


Under Pressure

by CopperBeech



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Bodyswap, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Don't copy to another site, Drinking, Drunken Kissing, Fluff and Angst, I'm a Little Stupid For Kissing, Kissing, M/M, Mutual Pining, The Night At Crowley's Flat (Good Omens), Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21512236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperBeech/pseuds/CopperBeech
Summary: For centuries, Crowley’s been stealing kisses when Aziraphale’s blackout drunk. He doesn’t get enough chances.But in the morning, after waking up by himself on a hard couch, while he was trying to decide whether to just discorporate or throw himself at Aziraphale’s feet and sayI’m sorry, I know, you’re an angel, I’m a demon, I took advantage, I won’t do it again,he’d heard Aziraphale say “Oh Lord, my head. Do you remember anything about last night? Because it’s all blank to me after we opened that third jug.” He’d thought, all right, either he wants to help us both save face, and he’s letting me know we can’t let it happen again, or he really doesn’t remember and I had better never remind him.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 73
Kudos: 385





	Under Pressure

**Author's Note:**

> Familiar territory, and not a lot in the way of plot. My last fic about them was more kink than kiss and I felt I owed the boys one. Or maybe I was just in the mood to write a lot of tasty kissing. Just soft fluffy stuff for a cold day.

The Bentley’s been playing _Under Pressure_ a lot lately. Crowley knows why.

The thing is, he was never that huge a fan of Queen. It’s just something the car does to anything else he tries to play in it, ever since the band started headlining in the Seventies. And it has a damnable (he’s an expert on that) knack for taunting him when things aren’t going well. For a week after he’d delivered the Antichrist to the Sisters of St. Beryl, it had persistently cued up _Keep Yourself Alive,_ and didn’t that feel like biting on tinfoil, especially when Hastur dissolved the Order in his typically ham-fisted, extreme-prejudice style.

It has a nasty way of refinding _Pain is so Close To Pleasure_ every time he and Aziraphale have one of those prickly, circling-each-other tiffs. He thinks they want the same thing, not just so far as the End of the World goes, but from each other. He just can’t be sure, because it feels too dangerous even to talk about, as if some eavesdropping Archangel or Duke might step out of the shadows with a smug look of suspicions confirmed. The Arrangement, they might both be able to explain away. What he wants... not so much.

And now they’re only days from the reckoning, and it’s been making them drink heroically, with a stamina built up over centuries but apparently not infallible. They’re both scared white, and there’s not enough whisky in Scotland to take the edge off that, which is how they’ve come to this point: he’s walking softly, snake in the grass, across the room in the back of the bookshop where a bottle clanked against its fallen brother several minutes ago and Aziraphale has slid down in the overstuffed chair he prefers. Crowley always sits on the other side of the room, facing him across an ocean of Axminster. They both make sure of that.

He glides more than steps across the carpet. He’s drunk on his ass too, he’s absolutely shitfaced, or otherwise he wouldn’t have the stones to do this. It’s been a couple of hours since he knew the dog had found its master, and pretty soon they were too pissed to do anything except pour another, and now Aziraphale’s unlocked an achievement that hasn’t been in his repertory since Elizabeth the First and frankly passed out. He’s done it daintily, as he does everything, head to one side, not snoring or slack, but looking beatifically peaceful with one hand trailing off the chair arm.

Crowley drops down on his hunkers and traces his finger in a line that moves just a breath above the back of that broad, soft hand, a dusting of blond hair showing at the wrist, below the cuffs of the blessed cocoon of linen and velveteen that Aziraphale exists in. The angel’s head is inclined toward him, tipped a little against the chair back, and with his heart hammering in a way even he finds ridiculous, Crowley bends and barely brings their lips together, freezing movement as soon as he makes contact. It feels as if some nameless energy inside him is trying to push right out through his skin, as if a touch anywhere would ignite a static spark. He stays that way, breathing in a scent that’s Saint-Auguste 2016 and that elusive cologne and under it all simply the ground note of _Aziraphale,_ for as long as he dares, feeling how precariously his drunken serpent legs are maintaining this awkward position, not wanting to end the moment and knowing he has to.

When he tries to rise he ends up in a clumsy heap on the carpet. His heart thumps but Aziraphale doesn’t wake. He scoots backward on his elbows and bum and manages to get his back against the couch, lever himself up onto it; drops his head in his hands and tries to think with a mind blanked by alcohol and more than one flavor of despair.

After several long minutes he hears Aziraphale shift position.

”Ogh. Mm. Lost the thread there rather. What were you saying?”

“Nothing worth repeatin’. Be’er sober up maybe.”

“Don’ want to.”

“ ‘re all the world’s got.”

“God help it.”

“Assa problem, innit?”

He got away with it. Better not try again.

_It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about._

* * *

It started, really, in Mesopotamia when they’d just gone on their first real bender (which resulted in their first hangover, before they’d pieced out how to avoid that). Humans had finally gotten the knack of making really good wine, and after crossing paths as they did every so often, they’d gone back to where Aziraphale was staying and incidentally collecting samples of every vintage the locals had come up with. It was Crowley who’d wanted to try them all, once he realized what they were on to, and at some point later he came out of a blurry haze to find they were giggling over things that really shouldn’t be quite _that_ funny, like Crowley -- he was Crawly then -- being mistaken for Pazuzu, whom the locals regarded for some incomprehensible reason as the protector of unborn children (“C’n just see _me_ lookin’ after kids – “ “You’d be, ah _hopeless_ , I’d pay to watch you…”).

There was another of those fuzzy gaps, and when the haze lifted he’d found he was kissing the angel, sloppily and repeatedly, and Aziraphale was _kissing him back,_ the two of them blundering over each other’s extremities in a fumbling attempt to embrace without spraining themselves. He had the sense they were both feeling their way into it, Aziraphale was tentative one moment and almost painfully urgent the next, and he couldn’t aim and planted one wet kiss on Crowley’s eyebrow and another more or less in his ear (which had its points). Crowley’d watched them in Eden, he supposed they both had, and it was almost the first thing he'd wanted to do when he first saw Aziraphale, but he’d been able to keep from botching everything up, which he was sure would be the result, until now. They were still giggling and too impaired to do much more about it, although hands had ended up inside shawls and up skirts somehow and he’d gotten to the point of nuzzling against the angel’s chest before passing out.

But in the morning, after waking up by himself on a hard couch, while he was trying to decide whether to just discorporate or throw himself at Aziraphale’s feet and say _I’m sorry, I know, you’re an angel, I’m a demon, I took advantage, I won’t do it again,_ he’d heard Aziraphale say through the tinny pounding of his hangover: “Oh Lord, my head. Do you remember anything about last night? Because it’s all blank to me after we opened that third jug.” He’d thought, all right, either he wants to help us both save face, and he’s letting me know it can’t happen again (all the reasons why were presenting themselves starkly to his scalded senses), or he really doesn’t remember and I had better never remind him.

Since then, as much as they drank (it really was the most remarkable invention the humans had come up with, right up there with the wheel), they’d almost never done so without the space of a room or the obstacle of a table between them, unless they were someplace crushingly public. And they’d learned to sober up – most of the time, anyway – before getting that far gone, at least until now.

But he never forgot the occasion, nor the tempting possibility that the angel _could_ get drunk enough to forget anything that happened after a certain point in the evening. He still didn’t have the nerve unless Aziraphale had truly and well drunk himself under the table. He had a chance here and there, once at the Bacchanalia (he’d been very bold, given the general frenzy around him, and left kisses everywhere he could reach, damn you I am sealing you mine, he’d thought) before putting his head down and just blacking out himself (a Senator’s wife, who had a soft spot for Aziraphale’s singing, threw a discarded toga over them). There’d been a mead hall in the Danelaw where someone had proposed a drunken version of Last Man Standing, and that man had been Crowley (who’d been doing a star turn as Loki in Norway before hearing about King Guthrum’s new harper Aziraphale), because he kept sneaking a miracle to sober up, something the angel forgot to do.

Now he regrets not snatching every chance he might have had. At the same time it feels a little wrong, and that’s ridiculous, he’s a fucking demon, he should be prepared to ravish Aziraphale like an incubus, except he doesn’t want that, he wants to stroke and cherish him and trace all the lavish curves of that Celestial body with worshipful fingers; tell him that he’s perfect, kiss the soft indentations of throat and palms. He’s absolutely the crappiest excuse for a demon that ever survived the Fall, and it’s all going to blow up and he wonders if he’ll have the nerve to grab the angel and smash their mouths together stone sober in the last second before the Four Horsepeople thunder across Megiddo. He’s got to think of something. Aziraphale is too much a stickler for the rules. Demons don’t love angels. Angels don’t cross Heaven.

Saying goodnight feels like cutting off his own hand. He stays in the Bentley, watching the lights flicker in the bookshop, long enough that he’s afraid Aziraphale will look out the window and see him.

It’s summer, but he feels cold driving home.

* * *

“We were seriously pissed last night.”

They’re making their way toward Tadfield and what used to be St. Beryl’s, hoping for a thread to pull, not seriously expecting much. Aziraphale looks a little green around the gills still, as if he’d been too drunk even to remember how to sober himself up properly. Managed part of the way, at least. Crowley makes a mental note to help out on future occasions before remembering there probably won’t be any.

“We’ve been there before, Crowley. Are you quite all right driving?”

“Tickety- _boo_ ,” he says in a tone of flat mockery that means _damn everything to Hell,_ which is where he hopes no one is listening.

He’s a cat on hot bricks. The impact of a barrage of stupid paintballs makes him jump as if the last battle's already begun, somewhere in his mind it already has, and he’s angry and ruthless enough that turning toy guns into real ones just takes off the edge. He’s held back for sixty centuries, hoping for some sort of miracle (who’s going to do it?) to break down the walls and end the cosmic _bullshit_ and let him take his angel in his arms without fearing they’ll be obliterated in the next second, and this is where it’s brought him. For a moment he doesn’t care whether the Horsemen ride. Let it all burn.

There’s another moment where he thinks _this is where it’s going to happen._ Aziraphale suggesting that anything about him is _nice,_ when it feels as if all the _nice_ got burnt out of him a long time ago, fills him with such a stew of rage and longing that without thinking he’s got the angel jacked against the wall. He’s furious and needy and wanting to go back to that room in the Caucasus five thousand years ago, when there was only innocent giggling and the fumbling of a couple of Celestial adolescents who just wanted each other and were foolish enough to think they could get away with it for an hour, when the people who held their respective leashes weren’t watching. They’ve been drinking like fish ever since, whenever they’ve been together, not sure whether they were hoping to remake that moment or blot it out. At least, that’s how Crowley feels about it.

He sees Aziraphale glancing down toward his lips, not into his eyes. In another second they’re going to have to admit it and…

…then Sister Mary turns up. And he has to snatch at the least hope.

* * *

Bike Girl makes him wonder. There’s something too unchancy about the chance encounter. He doesn’t know why, but it makes him think _maybe we’ll pull this off._

The hope lasts a roulette wheel’s worth of hours.

_We have nothing whatever in common._

Is Aziraphale asking him to give the lie to that?

The laughter, the hands under the shawls. _Nothing whatever?_

His heart’s been scythed out. He waits until he’s out of sight of the bandstand before holding his palm over his face, drawing it against his lips, imagining it’s Aziraphale.

* * *

Aziraphale’s got more spine and grit than Crowley ever suspected; after centuries of seeing him roll over and play dead for wankers like Gabriel, he never imagined the angel hitching a ride on an old whore as magnificent and confident as one of the priestesses of Inanna. He remembers all over again why he fell in love with the beautiful bastard, an angel who would give away his sword and lie to God and hold a wing over a demon, how has he forgotten? Aziraphale’s heart breaks rules, even when he’s afraid to.

And Bike Girl, who’s now Book Girl, turns away and leaves a last prophecy fluttering towards them.

They make it back from Tadfield, shattered, barely tracking. This isn’t over yet: Even with the angel beside him, hands touching, so close that his snake nature can feel the body heat (what if he transformed right here on the bus, crept inside the twill jacket, said _keep me warm?_ ), he’s got the bloody song running in his head again, that jittering ground bass, the tinkling celestial keyboard chords, like Hell and Heaven reminding them how easily they can both be crushed. He knows now that there’s a third power in Creation, and it’s _our side,_ the world’s side, and as he opens the door of the flat he wants to just gather up Aziraphale into his arms and say _It’s us now._ But the angel looks wrung out with exhaustion, and what if Crowley’s telling himself sweet lies (it’s an art he’s known for), what if it’s completely the wrong thing to do? Even if it isn’t, if he starts kissing Aziraphale, he won’t be able to stop. Keeping the angel safe (he still thinks of it this way, the blessed idiot never even looks before he crosses the street) is more important. The bottle they’d killed waiting for the Oxford bus has worn off, and maybe they’d better not have any more. They need to focus, they’ve only got a few hours to learn each other down to the last gesture.

He finds they already have. His mocking _tickety-boo_ becomes Peak Aziraphale, the angel’s diffidence sharpens to a bladelike edge, has he been memorizing every detail of Crowley these six thousand years?

Yes, Crowley thinks, you have. Just as I’ve been memorizing you. All those times when we had to part and I wouldn’t know if I’d see you again for a year, a decade, a century, I’d commit the shade of your eyes to memory, the sweet labyrinth curves of your ear and the shape of your fingernails, and the rhythms of your speech and the surety of your walk.

He’s meant to be the expert on possession here. He livened up a few slumber parties after that farcical Exorcist film (Pazuzu, _really_ ). He remembers how the Lapp shamans took off their shadows and put them in this animal or that (it’s still dark out, so that won’t work). There are a lot of ways to do this. He wants to see what Aziraphale makes of this one. Normally no one could learn any of them in the time they have, but the angel’s demonstrated that he’s a natural; if any way works for them, this will, and maybe Agnes Nutter knew that, too.

“We’ll try this first,” he says. “Still breathing? Know you don’t need to. Not sure how much you do it.”

“Habit,” says Aziraphale. “People look askance if you don’t. I became quite punctilious about it during the vogue for vampire stories, when people noticed that I don’t age. Some awkward moments.”

They can still manage a few laughs.

“All right. Breath. _Ruach._ Remember that’s what She put into them. Breath goes to the heart. What we’ve got to trade.”

“Didn't that come to mean the knowledge of good and evil – ?”

“Ah, yes, I did put my hand in there.”

The banter makes it easier. He’s going to do this. He rests his hands on Aziraphale’s shoulders – yes, that’s a quiver – and exchanges gazes with the angel, the dark spectacles long discarded; he’s a serpent thing and a damned thing with marred citrines for eyes but his angel doesn’t flinch. He drops his head a little and parts his lips.

And there’s no discomfiture or rejection in those blue eyes. He thinks he’s got his answer.

“Breathe out,” he says. “Just when I do. Hold the thought. _I am you, you are me._ ”

The ghost of lost kisses hovers between them and slips away, the world loosens around him as his body breathes him out and breathes in Aziraphale, and then he’s in that solid sturdy shape, feeling himself settle into the heart, the bones.

He sees, in his own eyes, the dawning consciousness of what it meant for him, in his body, his foolish gimcrack half-human corporation, to be this close to kissing his angel, and if this all goes sideways, he’ll take that with him.

* * *

The toasts are endless. They’re out of their faces, hammered, arseholed, bloody _paralytic._

It goes on long after the Ritz. Aziraphale has wine stores that would put the Michelin people to shame, and he’s uncorked the best of them, on top of what the Ritz had to offer. They’ve got all the time in the world now; Crowley does nothing to interrupt the joyous confirmations that this shelf of volumes and that antique treasure are intact, resurrected. Adam’s put in some extras. It’s as if there’s a bridge to the human world now, the one they’ve chosen.

They’re giggling and Aziraphale’s just stumbled over a perfectly mundane carpet-edge and Crowley’s caught him, when the angel surprises him by saying “Bet’r sober up now, d’n’t y’think?” and not just saying it but hauling himself up on Crowley’s arm to bring himself into focus, and _doing it._

“Already?” Crowley says. He’s been flying, not knowing what tomorrow or even the next minute would be, only that it would be safe; just exhilarated to be alive _right now_

“Yes,” says the angel. “Because I don’t want you to think this is only all right when I’m drunk."

He brushes Crowley's startled lips with two fingers.

The first kiss is chaste, a whisper of silk over silk, and Crowley’s stunned himself sober before it breaks. His angel’s cheek is brushing his, and he’s wondering how he held off so long ( _he loves his shop, his books, I wanted to see his happiness_ all sounds better than _I was still afraid he'd pull away_.).

“I don’t think we have to pretend this away any more, do we?” says Aziraphale, and that’s his hand at the back of Crowley’s neck, fingers adventuring in the hairs at his nape. “I was very close to saying so when you – well, the other night, but – the pressure’s off now, for good, I think. I don’t picture Gabriel walking in on us, do you?”

“How many times – “ Crowley manages before he finds the angel tasting him delicately, breathing in his scent ( _ruach,_ what God put in us), and he lets himself stroke the cornsilk curls with a bare touch of his palm. “Did you know I was – _every time – “_

“How many times were there?” Aziraphale’s baiting him gently now. “Well, to answer you, a few. Enough to know. Night before last, at any rate, so I – “ The angel seems to realize then that he can do only one thing with his mouth at a time, and talking seems like a low priority.

Aziraphale’s apparently decided that he’s more deserving of reverent savor than any pudding on the Ritz dessert trolley, because he’s being grazed with the bare touch of lips up one side of his neck, along his jaw, the convolutions of his ear, as if anything more intimate will have to wait for permissions. It’s Crowley who takes the angel’s face between his hands – _I am you, you are me –_ and outright marries tongue to tongue, rakes his fingers up between the short silky locks, bugger all caution. It’s the epiphany, _I love him,_ of a foolish demon surrounded by empty wine jars, and desperate stifled yearning bubbling over on a couch in Stabiae (he’d been rolled in the toga when he came to, alone), and a furtive moment in the back of the Mermaid after _Hamlet_ had truly taken off, they drank the wine out of tankards there and Aziraphale’s head had ended up heavy on his shoulder and it was dark enough, who would see him tip up the angel’s face and feather over it with his lips, or be sober themselves enough to care? (Other than Kit Marlowe, he supposed, who’d been trying to get into the demon’s pants ever since he’d used Crowley as a model for Mephistophilis in _Doctor Faustus.)_

They’re writing sonnets with their tongues dancing over one another, rondels with their hands in each other’s hair, and then he’s frankly gulping the angel they way they’d gulped that first jug, like idiots, back in that little room near the walls of Uruk when the world was barely out of its wrappings. He’s a little light-headed with it too, as the wine’d made them then, when one of them, he’s not sure who, remembers that the bookshop has furniture.

* * *

“I hated myself for being so afraid. Part of me always knew you were the only one that mattered. But it meant breaking all the rules, and I thought _you_ were the one who could show me how to do that…”

They’ve ended up on the carpet, there in the ocean that once parted them, in a scatter of cushions (Aziraphale has quite the collection of needlepoint), because ceasing to touch for even as long as it would take to get them to Aziraphale’s rooms or back to Crowley’s flat is unbearable to even think about. The absurd antique loveseat is too damned small.

They’re still in most of their clothes; Aziraphale’s lost the tie, his collar’s open (Crowley’s discovered that the angel likes sharp little love bites and he likes the squirming soft gasps that result), he’s got his head back against a stitch-picked pattern of cabbage roses and he looks utterly precious, a little tousled, pink.

“Like that first time. I was terribly frightened of what could happen to you, I wanted you to do it again so much, and all I could think of…”

“Was to pretend you were too drunk to remember.”

“I panicked. It seemed like the only safe thing. And then the other times… I started to wonder if it was something you only did when you were, ah – “

“Trollied out of my skull.”

The angel traces a finger down him. They’ve managed to get his shirt open, anyway; they want to find their way to each other, but a miracle seems crassly abrupt and the fidgeting demanded by zippers and layers and tight waistbands -- the clothes were a hell of a lot easier back in Uruk -- is in competition with the need to simply keep putting their lips and teeth and tongues on the parts of each other that they _can_ reach at this point.

“Well, it was, but it was because that was the only time I thought you – wouldn’t hate me for it. ’Cos you wouldn’t know.”

If they’re going to talk, Crowley _will_ get to work. The waistcoat buttons are small and fidgety.

“I know. I pushed you away so many times. I thought I was protecting you. The risk…”

“I know.” He finds he isn’t angry about any of it. Maybe they’ll talk about it another time, but not now. Aziraphale’s got a little spray of freckles over his collarbones, and Crowley sets about kissing them individually.

There is something he does find himself wondering about.

“You’ve done some things – with them, haven’t you?”

“A few.”

He’s not stopping with the freckles, to let Aziraphale know that doesn’t upset him and because angel tastes good. “Same. Wasn’t that good… it wasn’t – “ _It wasn’t you._ He doesn’t have to say it.

“Yes. It got so that – well, you know how harping and singing were my cover sometimes? Easy to slip into. Another reason to get used to breathing. So when, well, when castrati were in fashion, I pretended to be one -- it backfired a bit, how was I to know -- I thought it would discourage interest...”

“Oh bollocks. No.”

“Well, exactly.”

“There is clearly only one way to stop you saying things like that.” Aziraphale seems happy to be silenced. He’s got his hands under Crowley’s shirt, stroking down the twin lines between his shoulders where his wings unfold.

“It was good to see those,” he says when the demon comes up for air. “I missed them.”

“I remember being under yours.”

“I knew even then you hated being cold.”

“Warm now.”

Aziraphale shudders every time the demon moves his lips another inch down his breastbone. There’s a little fleshy roll at the base of his ribs and it feels like the most delicious, lush thing in the world. If you’re a Celestial, you get the human corporation that aligns with your nature, and Aziraphale’s is strength and stubbornness, crisscrossed invincibly with sensuality and song, or at least Crowley feels it that way.

“What sorts of things did you sing?” he asks when he can tear himself away from the flower-petal texture of a nipple that tightens against his lips like the flower’s centre. You could get drunk on that alone, the different sensations it coaxes from your tongue, your underlip. ”I missed that part."

Aziraphale surprises him by demonstrating in the key of Monteverdi.

 _Se mi dirai, che m'ami,_  
_Io mi contentarò._  
_Dimmelo, dimmelo dunque, o cara, cara  
_ _E se vivo mi vuoi, non dir di no._

 _If you tell me you love me_  
_I will be content,_  
_Tell me so, my dear, my dear,  
_ _If I am to live, you must not say no._

“He really got Nero wrong. But Seneca, just about right.”

“Evading the point.”

“Go on with what you were doing.”

* * *

“Make your hair the way it was that night.”

“Like this?” He thinks he was wearing the braid back in Uruk, but it’s been a long time.

“Oh yes.”

The obvious miracle turned out to be simply getting themselves up to Aziraphale’s little-used bedroom, where they could continue undressing each other at leisure, like an archaeologist dusting away the centuries from a perfect vase, or carving, or wine jar. He tastes salt on the angel’s cheeks after Aziraphale uncovers his feet, the old white burn scars that he’s forgotten because he can’t see them, from a church floor in the Blitz; Holy burns can never quite be erased from demonic flesh.

“I knew you loved me then, you know. That it wasn’t some stupid game about tempting me, or stealing kisses. And I couldn’t stand it. Knowing that I was expendable to Heaven, but not to you. I couldn’t make sense of it.”

“ ‘S the thing about this world, angel. It doesn’t make sense. Not supposed to. You'll get used to it.”

There’s one lamp burning in the room, only enough light to keep from falling over things (not that that’s a worry at the moment); just now Aziraphale’s propped on one elbow and the light’s behind his head, making his pale hair into a halo, which suits. He’s Divine, so Crowley worships. He hasn’t got much experience, but long nights of imagining are stored up in his heart, wishes made on a whole firmament full of stars.

He’s always been able to do quirky things with his tongue, and he writes _I love you_ with its just-divided tip across the skin of the angel’s round, soft lower belly, before setting out to demonstrate.

* * *

_You said you never did this._

Aziraphale’s embraced breathing so completely that it goes on although his eyes are closed and all his limbs are at peace, _the lineaments of gratified desire_.

There’s music running in Crowley's mind still, but it’s an angel’s voice. _If you tell me you love me I will be content._

He leans in softly, not to wake him. The angel’s sleeping deeply, but this time the kiss isn’t stolen.

_finis_

**Author's Note:**

> "The lineaments of gratified desire" is a line from WiIllam Blake's quatrain about what lovers require of one another. Blake's poem is heteronormative, but we'll spot him that (if you've read my Absent Without Leave series you know I love me some Blake).
> 
> The brief lyric Aziraphale sings is from a duet between a pageboy and maid in Monteverdi's bravura opus _The Coronation of Poppaea,_ one of the first operas taking its plot from history and still one of the most cynical and disturbing ever written. It's full of the depravity of Nero's Rome packed into incongruous chocolate-box music; the duet is a pretty little thing that adds nothing to the plot but lets the audience breathe a little. The page's voice is in the range of a boy soprano, castrato, or trouser role mezzo (the go-to casting nowadays). I've never imagined Aziraphale singing any voice in the angelic choir other than counter-tenor, the range that Freddie Mercury and Bowie exploited in _Under Pressure_. Forgive the music geeking.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OvPmWIbI7Y
> 
> If you liked, share, reblog, comment! Authors are always thirsty :)
> 
> Come say hello on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


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